20 December 2020

Jean-Daniel Pollet's Méditerranée (1963)

 

Jean-Daniel Pollet (1936-2004) made this film in collaboration with Volker Schlöndorff. Pollet made a considerable number of scenes around the Mediterranean to put together this 42-minute film, with the poetic words being written by Philippe Sollers. The music is by Antoine Duhamel, the son of the writer Georges. Godard praised the film in Cahiers du cinéma and was inspired by it make some shots in Le Mépris.

In Substance (128 (2016)), Andrew Ritchey says Méditerranée 'played a crucial role in the development of film theory from the 1960s to the early 1970s'. It was a link between film and the nouveau roman.

Memory, past civilisations, tradition, beauty, pain, water. There are also a number of very unpoetic, gory scenes of bullfighting.

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